Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Today's Fanboy Delusion

Today I'd rather be...

... having a stiff one with Austin Nichols.

Without actually ever being gay The Walking Dead has gotten really REALLY GAY this season - which sucks because this season is excruciating and more than ever I am only hate-watching the show. But Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan (who is the most excruciating of all) has brought a real weird gay rape fantasia feel to the series.

So we get this scene, which is set up as if Spencer (that's Austin's character's name) is getting prettied up (he is even called "pretty" seconds before this) to go and flirt with one of Negan's female sidekicks, and instead he goes and well he flirts with Negan himself. And the camera...

... it does linger upon the backside of his khakis. And as he saunters up the stairs Negan says, "Oh crap. Is that for me?" (You can hear the audio over on Twitter, where I tweeted this scene as I watched it.) And you can't see the booze at this point - it's played as if he's taking in tall pretty Austin as his gift.

I don't want to get into spoilers but let's just say this "date" goes about as well as you think it might with a psychopath like Negan. But this episode also features all three of the show's openly gay characters (well the show hasn't mentioned that Jesus is gay yet, but he is), not to mention Daryl who, well, they keep calling him asexual but they're not really fooling anybody.

I don't know that I can make a coherent argument about the show's attitude towards gay men because I don't think the show has a coherent attitude toward gay men, or towards anything, except perhaps empty posturing and self-important nihilism. So of course when the Gay comes, after several seasons of getting shit for avoiding all things Gay, it comes to us in the middle of a story about a man with a great big killer phallus. The Walking Dead is nothing if not always thuddingly, exhaustively literal in its obsessions. Dick is just the zombie meat of the day, it seems.

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